Steffen Zetzmann

We examine how rising energy costs affect rental housing markets and inequality. Using listing data for the 30 largest German cities from 2015–2024, we find that higher energy prices are passed through to net rents in high-rent segments, where inefficient properties see significant rent reductions, but not in lower-priced segments. This asymmetry reflects tighter markets and lower demand elasticity in the affordable segment. Consequently, low-income households face much larger increases in total housing costs. Our results show how segmented housing markets can amplify inequality when energy prices rise, highlighting important distributional implications for climate policy.

Kiel Working Paper, SSRN

Housing (un-)affordability has become a defining social and economic challenge in German cities, shaping both wealth accumulation and intergenerational inequality. We decompose affordability into two components: the ability to service monthly mortgage payments and the ability to meet the upfront cash requirements for purchasing a home. Combining data on re-gional mortgage financing conditions, household incomes, and house prices from 1980 to 2024, we find that mortgage payments relative to income have changed little over time. In stark contrast, upfront costs relative to income have risen sharply: whereas households in 1980–1990 needed savings of less than two years of annual income to cover the equity re-quirement for an apartment purchase, households in 2015–2024 require more than three years. These results show that focusing on mortgage costs alone severely understates the decline in housing affordability. Instead, rising entry costs have become the primary constraint on homeownership, reinforcing advantages for households with existing wealth or familial finan-cial support.

Kiel Working Paper, Kiel Policy Brief

Media coverage: Zeit, tagesschau

Liability-side equivalence predicts that the statutory incidence of a tax or fee does not affect its economic incidence, but empirical tests have thus far relied on laboratory studies as identification is challenging in broad real-world reforms. To study liabilityside equivalence using field data, we exploit a German policy intervention that shifted the statutory incidence of real estate agent fees from property buyers to sellers. We use more than 600,000 property listings and employ a difference-in-differences estimation exploiting object-level susceptibility to the intervention. Contrary to economic theory, we find that key market outcomes are affected by the shift in statutory incidence. Specifically, sellers do not pass on the statutory burden through higher prices and instead reduce demand for brokerage. Intuitively, the decrease in demand is highest when brokers are expensive and offer little benefit. Using micro-level transaction data from seven tight housing markets, we show that off-platform negotiations do not rectify liability-side equivalence. Our results challenge the notion that statutory incidence is irrelevant for the distribution of economic incidence.

This paper investigates the heterogeneous impact of monetary policy on house prices across geographical regions. We document substantial spatial heterogeneity in the sensitivity of house prices to monetary policy shocks. In large superstar agglomerations with low rental yields, prices decline (rise) more strongly in response to contractionary (expansionary) monetary policy compared to peripheral regions. We propose a mechanism based on pre-existing differences in regional discount rates for real estate assets.